It's been almost a year to the day since we first started blogging about our little adventure here on the Dark Continent--little over a year, actually--and there has been a tremendous amount of change for the family: new jobs, new friends, Mosby, and most recently the addition of a beautiful baby girl. It's amazing to think how far we've come since we first stepped off the plane in July 2011 and that we are already past the half-way mark in our tour. But one thing we set out to do from the beginning somehow just never happened. That thing? Drinking camel's milk. But more on that in a little bit.
The 20th of August was the Muslim celebration of Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, where all practicing Muslims are to fast during the day in an attempt to bring themselves closer to god. It also was the date set for the election of Somalia's new government. If you'll indulge me for a brief history lesson, Somalia has not had a functioning government in over 20 years and the country since 2006 has been dominated by a militant al-Qa`ida affiliate. So this election was a fairly big deal for the people. It also was a public holiday in Kenya.
Given the convergence of these two events on the same day, Kerry decided we should invite some friends over and indulge in a feast of Somali food. Neither of us had ever tried Somali food before, but Kerry stumbled upon this website dedicated to Somali cuisine with what seemed like some great recipes. We scoured the options and pulled out several dishes that seemed to make up a fair representation of Somali cuisine and not just appropriated Italian dishes from when Somalia was an Italian colony back at the turn of last century (though we did have one macaroni dish just as a safety). Kerry hired her language instructor and another Somali woman to prepare the dishes for us in hopes of getting a little more authenticity to the meal. Since we weren't sure how the food was going to turn out or how much we would have, we decided to keep the invites low, though as it turned out the food was great and we ended up making enough for three times the number of people we had come.
Somali's are deathly afraid of dogs, so Mosby had to spend the majority of the time outside before he got a nice long walk from Lukas.
Just a random picture of Kerry and Aliza that I like
The food was excellent; much more flavorful than anyone expected. Most of us were expecting something like Ethiopian food or more Middle Eastern food, but it was more like South Asian cuisine. Camel meat makes up a significant portion of the Somali diet, but we opted out of the camel dishes.
Which brings us back to the opening point in this post: camel's milk. Kerry requested that our chef's bring some fresh camel's milk with them for us to sample and we got out shot glass for everyone to try. Even though it is the namesake of our blog, both Kerry and I were admittedly a little nervous about trying it, not really because we were afraid of the taste but more discomfort over where they got it (I mean, who's milking a camel in the middle of Nairobi?) and what might happen to us after we drank it. But, curiosity got the better of us. We bellied-up to the table, took a glass, and tossed it back. By and large, it was indistinguishable from cow's milk but it has a very smokey flavor to it, which had to be intentional in the way it was prepared, but we never got a square answer from the Somali's. Either way, it was a good conversation piece as all the guest dared one another to take a shot. I'm happy to report that the majority did.
So the Somali feast was a success and Kerry and I got to cross off one of our goals set over a year ago. We still have a few more goals to reach over this next year; we hope they all go down as smooth (sorry to end this post with a rather bad play on words, but I couldn't resist).
